Prologue
For those of you who didn’t get your little musical intro last week, the sound is off on your computer. Either that or you don’t have a sound card. So get one. Or you won’t have a musical intro this week either. Or ever.
Prologue II
We got a lot of comments back about Cosmic Song’s race last week. Among them, a question from Torrey, “When will she run again?” That would be August 28, if all goes well. She came out of the last race in good shape and should like the increased distance (6 furlongs) of the next, although the competition will be tougher (Maiden Special Weights).
When we returned from the race, there was a cryptic message on our email from Hal Hollis to the effect that “Lem got fragged last night. We’re bummin’.”
Hal and his wife Jennie have owned the property just south of us for the last few years, but most of the time they live in Alpharetta, Georgia. Neither Siobhan nor I could remember who Lem was but we figured it must be a beloved pet, like maybe their little bird who travels with them whenever they come to Ocala. Siobhan was horrified at the demise of the pet and wrote a sympathy note back to the Hollises.
Hal quickly responded. Heavens no, nothing so grim as a dead pet. Hal was just mourning the loss of a character on The Shield, the old CDs of which we’d passed along earlier. Geez Hal, get a grip, you had us going there.
Hal, by the way, solves all the blog problems that Siobhan can’t figure out, so we have to be nice to him even if he is a little too dedicated to defunct TV series’.
Dominic Imprescia
The guy in the picture with me is 92-year-old Dominic Imprescia, our first trainer of consequence, now retired. He still owns horses, though. And he still drives, mostly to the Hollywood Dog Track, a half mile from his house, to gamble.
Dominic, a used car dealer at the time, raced horses in New England about 50 years ago. One day, he decided he could do a better job training than the guy he had so he started training his own horses at Suffolk Downs and Rockingham Park. He did pretty well, so he started getting outside horses, eventually becoming one of the leading trainers in New England.
Dominic liked to bet, so he was not above shenanigans. Other trainers were so leery of his tactics, they were reluctant to claim his horses, fearful they might inherit a horse which had run its last race. One time, Dominic had an excess of horses at Calder so he took a few up to Boston to run and, hopefully, lose via the claim box. All these horses were healthy, but ran beneath their value so Dominic could lose them. The other trainers were mortally skeptical. Dominic ran a horse named ‘Bama Red on the bottom five consecutive times and nobody claimed him.
“What the hell’s the matter with these guys?” he wondered. “Why won’t anybody take my horses?”
“Well gee, Dom,” I pointed out, “you’ve already made more on the purses than you would have on the claims.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said. And he kept it up until finally they all were claimed.
Dominic almost had a Kentucky Derby favorite. A horse named Timely Writer won the Florida Derby at Gulfstream and the Flamingo at Hialeah (he bought a salmon-colored suit for the latter and a light purple job for the former) before the horse coliced in Kentucky a week before the Derby, requiring surgery and knocking him out of the race. Timely Writer recovered and came back to run big, only to break down in the Marlboro Cup and be euthanized on the track. It took a while, but Dominic eventually put it behind him and became his old self.
In his seventies (which, until recently, I used to think was old), he would ask me not to check out of my room at the Holiday Inn, overlooking Calder. I don’t want to say there was hanky-panky with younger women involved but I don’t think he went over there to check the sheets.
Dominic received a one-year suspension in the late seventies when a needle was discovered in his shedrow in New Jersey. No problem. He assigned his horses to an assistant named Joe Perez and he trained from a trackside table in a restaurant on the top floor of the Holiday Inn. He was there for several hours every morning, holding court and training by phone. Joe Perez would come by after training hours were over and they would go over the events of the day, then Dominic would return for the races in the afternoon. He was a prolific tipper so nobody at the restaurant had any reservations about his usurpation of the territory.
The days are running out for the old racetrackers like Dominic. When he arrived last week to watch his horse run in the race prior to that of Cosmic Song, he was supported left and right by family members, shakier than we’d last remembered him, a brief, saddening moment and a reminder of our own mortality.
The Chefs Go West
We had dinner at 706 in Gainesville the other night (always a good idea) and it brought back memories of The Great California Invasion of 1990 or thereabouts.
Steve Solomon, proprietor of several Leonardos pizza joints in Gainesville, and his partner Mark Newman wanted to transition their restaurant at 706 University Avenue, across from the Subterranean Circus, into more of an upscale place, taking as their model some of the thriving California-pizza restaurants around L.A.
They offered me a deal. Since they were afraid to drive in L.A. traffic, they would pay all expenses for a one-week siege of Los Angeles if I would agree to be their driver. And they were renting a Lincoln Town Car back when these things looked like limos. Always eager to improve the local restaurant business, what could I say?
We found a comfortable suite in a West L.A. hotel and went about our business. I’d go out early in the morning to get the lay of the land (she lived on the West Side) and they, being late risers, would start out around lunch.
These guys were amazing in their abilities to visit several restaurants a day, sample the wares and still go out and enjoy a full meal at night. The restaurants we visited treated us very well, being universally helpful, opening their kitchens, discussing their menus, etc. Particularly memorable was a Wolfgang Puck place in Santa Monica called Chinois on Main, where the staff told us not to order anything….they would just bring us the meal. And they did, a little bit of everything, distributed plentifully on three plates, a rare experience.
We stayed in Santa Monica that night and Steve, perhaps feeling like my selection of hotels had not been on the economical side, decided we would stay in a dump not far from the restaurant. Steve and Mark decided to take the room next to the manager’s office, which, I noticed, did not have a very secure lock.
“It’s next to the manager’s office,” Steve pooh-poohed. “What could go wrong?”
I parked the limo away from our rooms and took a nice, secure room on the second floor with brand new locks. I mean Venice, that place you always see on TV with the rollerbladers skating down arcing sidewalks, was just blocks away. And Venice was full of, well….derelicts, to put it kindly. And Santa Monica was no Grosse Pointe.
Anyway, during the night, some miscreant(s) gently broke into Steve and Mark’s room and rifled through their wallets, taking all the cash. Neither of them heard a thing.
“I know you guys sleep pretty sound,” I told them next day. “But you couldn’t even hear a burglar?”
“Well,” said Steve, no doubt also speaking for Mark, “I’m not sure I wanted to hear a burglar.”
The Chefs Visit the Circus
The next night, we all visited the famous Santa Monica Pier. Campy and a little bit sleazy, but worth the visit. While milling around the pier, we noticed off to the north a giant tent with a significant line of people waiting to get in.
“What do you think that could be?” Steve wanted to know.
“It looks like the circus,” said Mark.
“Let’s go down there.”
So we traipsed over to the gleaming tent and Steve found one of the employees.
“Yes, it is a circus,” he assured him.
“How much to get in?”
“Thirty nine dollars.”
“Wow, thirty nine dollars! That’s a lot. Does it have animals?”
“No sir, there are no animals.”
“Well,” said Steve, famously, “I’m not paying $39 for a circus with no animals.”
And so we passed, regrettably, on one of the first U.S. presentations of the now-ubiquitous Circ du Soleil.
Old College Magazine Joke (from 1965):
Once upon a time, there was a man who raised bulldogs. After years of patient effort, he finally raised what he considered to be the perfect bulldog and he was indeed proud. He showed his prize off constantly to one and all. One day, as the man was walking with his perfect bulldog, he met an urchin with a mangy yellow mongrel. The bulldog ambled over to the mongrel and sniffed, as bulldogs will.
The mongrel bit his head off with one ferocious snap.
“My God!” screamed the man, gazing at the remains of his wonderful bulldog in disbelief. “What the hell kind of dog would you call that thing?!?”
“Well,” offered the urchin, “I don’t exactly know what you would call him now, mister. But before I cut off his tail and painted him yaller, he was a alligator.”
That’s all, folks…..
